Launch the program and its "Access Points" tab provides an in-depth report on your network neighbours, including their name, MAC address, vendor, signal strength, encryption, country ID, mode, frequency, band, first and last seen times, supported bitrates, model and adapter. A convenient right-click menu allows you to connect to (or disconnect from) any particular access point.

An "Access Point Signal Graph" page plots signal strength over time. Run Homedale on a laptop and you'll be able to access connection quality in various locations. Right-clicking the graph displays options to save it as an image, or log the signal strength data to a text file.

A "Location" tab uses Google Geolocation and Mozilla Location Service to locate your current position on a map. Not exactly essential, but worth trying once, just to see if it works. (For us: Google did, Mozilla didn't.)

Homedale also has one or two useful configuration options. For example, by default it removes access points once they've disappeared for 1 minute, so you're only ever seeing active networks. Tell Homedale to never remove them and the report will list every detected network, whether it's currently active or not.

Version 1.56:
- New: Frequency usage tab added

Verdict:

A simple and straightforward wifi monitor with just enough features to be useful

There's a vast amount to learn, of course, and that's even before you start building your game. But there's plenty of documentation, tutorials, demos and sample projects to point you in the right direction.

The package is now entirely free, too - no annoying limitations, nag screens or anything else. Epic now only requires that you pay a 5% royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. And even then, you "pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization."

8.48 brings:
- Optimized grass rendering and procedural foliage system preview
- Plugins available in Marketplace
- Improved accuracy for motion blur
- New Tone Mapper
- Support for all the latest VR hardware including Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Steam VR and HTC Vive, Leap Motion, and Sony's Project Morpheus for PlayStation 4
- "Scrubbable" network replays with rewind support and live time scrubbing
- Visualize the memory footprint of game assets in an interactive tree map UI